In a television appearance on January 7, President Emmanuel Macron of France, rather than addressing his compatriots exclusively, directed his remarks to his “fellow citizens of the E.U.,” saying, “2018 is a very special year, and I will need you this year.” Macron, a former investment banker and cabinet minister in the Socialist government of...
America is a nation of normal people who find themselves thrust into increasingly abnormal situations. Left-wing ideologues want to take a country of families, churches, and businesses and turn it into a playpen of radical identities. This is to be done in the name of fighting oppression, where apparently the most oppressive thing of all...
U.S. employment increased over President Trump’s first year in office, expanding from 145,541,000 in January to 147,380,000 in December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thus, amid the sound and fury of #NeverTrump media coverage, there has been a significant, and overlooked, development. Donald Trump has avoided an economic curse shared by nearly every...
Student-loan debt in the United States is now $1.48 trillion. That incredible sum is a heavy drag on the economy and a burden on young people. And federal intervention in education is the cause. It wasn’t always this way. In June 1965, I began working as a salesman at the Sears store in Knoxville, receiving...
The lares and penates of post-Christian (actually postpagan) America are Money, Sex, and Power, not necessarily in that order but rather according to individual taste and proclivity. Our household gods are grinning and chuckling malevolently from the hearth as they behold the carnival of sexual scandal and hypocrisy that has been unfolding across the land...
Donald Trump’s first year as President is drawing to a close, and it’s been rough. The Republican Congress proved unequal to the task of repealing Obama Care. The border wall hasn’t been built. The administration is packed with generals and hawkish ideologues who push the President toward foreign intervention. A special prosecutor stalks the land,...
Barack H. Obama left office as the first Democratic president to preside over a net loss of domestic manufacturing jobs since the U.S. government started compiling records in the late 1930’s. There were 206,000 fewer manufacturing jobs in January 2017 (12,355,000) than in January 2009 (12,561,000) when Obama entered the White House, according to U.S....
The GOP-controlled Congress has received a report from the Pentagon advocating the conscription of women—the daughters, young wives, and young mothers of America, ages 18 to 25—according to the Washington Times. This is truly unprecedented. At the tail end of the Obama administration, then Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who opened combat roles to women (with...
In 1966 a film called Is Paris Burning?, based on a novel of the same name, was a cinematic sensation. Its subject was the liberation of Paris by the French Free Forces and the French Resistance in 1944. More than 70 years later Europe itself is afire as a combined Resistance force including rightists, “populists,”...
Step by step America is being primed for war with Iran. President Trump has not actually torn up the “Iran deal”—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that is supposed to defer the day the Islamic Republic might seek a nuclear weapon—but he “decertified” it in October, and his administration is under constant pressure from the...
The Las Vegas shooter who murdered some five-dozen country-music fans and injured over 500 more had barely cashed in his chips when Democrats, celebrities, and the punditocracy—not yet knowing exactly which guns the killer used—began calling for their favorite gun-control measures and blaming the NRA, Republicans, and even country-music fans themselves for this latest episode...
There were two reasons to support Donald J. Trump in the presidential campaign last year. The first was the man himself, whom one could trust to deliver a much needed shock to the utterly narcissistic, self-involved American political system that would knock it off stasis and get it moving again in a sane and responsible...
The liberal faith in the power of incantation is but one of many ways in which liberalism reveals its essentially religious nature. Following the politically complex Dutch elections and the relatively poor showing of the Front National in the French ones last spring, Western liberals were in a hurry to suggest that “populism” in Europe...
When he died on September 27 at the age of 91, Hugh Hefner was no playboy. He was an old man trapped in what amounted to a factory, surrounded by silicone, plastic, and hydrogen compounds. Playboy’s circulation had peaked 45 years earlier with its November 1972 issue. Even before then, Hef’s magazine had long ceded...
The unconstitutional Obama executive order known as DACA was rescinded by the Trump DOJ on September 5. Even as the courageous and unassuming A.G. Jeff Sessions made the announcement, thousands of tweets painted him as a hood-donning white-supremacist Russian agent. Nancy Pelosi effectively called for more public displays of Antifa violence across the fruited plain,...
No studies indicate, let alone demonstrate, that a significant percentage of ordinary white people “hate” black people, or black white, or indeed that an appreciable number belonging to any race in America today “hates” members of any other race. But there’s no question that a great many people who subscribe to any one of the...
Decades before Donald Trump vanquished Hillary Clinton, Pat Buchanan heralded the themes that would put Trump in the White House. Yet despite all that lead time, Trump’s victory was still in one sense premature. In the interval between Buchanan’s presidential bids in the 1990’s and Trump’s victory last November, the Republican Party paid little heed...
As the new French President, Emmanuel Macron seems determined to hitch opposites together, combine like with dislike, compatibles with incompatibles, and otherwise fudge his policies as he did during the electoral campaign. As a candidate for the office, he praised Angela Merkel’s decision to accept a million “refugees” from the Middle East and elsewhere—but has...
Since the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, Germans have debated the question of whether their country can ever be a “normal” one again. A current best-selling book—Finis Germania, by Rolf Peter Sieferle, a former left-wing intellectual who committed suicide before its publication—argues that since 1945 the German people have made scapegoats of...
Have you noticed? Newspapers and television channels across the land have discovered a new kind of human-interest story: the business-owning, family-man illegal immigrant who gets deported after living in this country for decades as a productive noncitizen. CNN’s website headlined the story of one Joel Colindres, “This is the face of deportation: A dad with...
Democracy is under attack, we now hear regularly. While Donald Trump, the GOP, and (if you ask Rachel Maddow) the weather have all been identified of late as “threats” to our democracy, the Great Satan is, of course, Russia, pop. 144,498,215. Vlad Putin directs, or winks and nods at, a Red Army of hackers who,...
In The Spectator (June 24, 2016) Charles Moore, the Grand Old Man of British journalism despite his relatively young age, writes, “How much longer can it go on? Deaths caused by terrorism are always followed now by candlelit vigils, a minute’s silence, victims’ families/government ministers/emergency services/clergy/imams all clustered together, walls of messages, flags at half-mast. ...
Proclaimed political “dynasties” in American history have never persisted beyond two generations. The Adams family produced two presidents in two generations, followed by an author of significant accomplishments who disdained democracy and never ran for political office. The Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin D., came from two branches of the family and later produced several public...
In The Spectator (June 24, 2016) Charles Moore, the Grand Old Man of British journalism despite his relatively young age, writes, “How much longer can it go on? Deaths caused by terrorism are always followed now by candlelit vigils, a minute’s silence, victims’ families/government ministers/emergency services/clergy/imams all clustered together, walls of messages, flags at half-mast. Instinctively I...
The party of Hillary Clinton has not stopped losing since last November. This fact is easily overlooked amid all of President Trump’s bad press, but Democrats have reliably come up short in special elections from Montana to Kansas to suburban Atlanta. Jon Ossoff, the Democrat running in Georgia’s Sixth District, raised over $23 million by...
James Comey’s curious and unorthodox contributions to the media’s rumor-fueled hysteria over the legitimacy of the Trump presidency—and perhaps the fate of the U.S. government and the American people—ought to raise a fundamental question in the minds of conservatives: Why did he have a job to begin with? It matters little whether we like the...
All immigrants to America demand a good deal of us, some more than others. Mexican immigrants (and after them the Muslim ones) demand the most. St. Patrick’s Day parades date from the late, prerevolutionary 18th century and have been an American institution ever since as a celebration of Irish history, culture, and cuisine. Cinco de...
A visitor to the United States from abroad, ignorant of recent American history, might find himself perplexed by the fact that the further the War Between the States recedes into the past, the larger it looms as the angry obsession of “progressive” Americans—the same people who insist at every turn that the country needs to...
A year ago the op-ed writers who present themselves as tutors to the nation insisted that Donald Trump could not and would not become president. Progressive pundits were certain of this—after all, they didn’t know anyone who was voting for him. The Republican wing of the commentariat, however, was equally sure that Trump would fail:...
The foreign policy of the Trump administration remains a mass of contradictions, with the White House evidently divided among nationalists, pragmatists, and certain advisors who prescribe an ever expanding hegemony. These rivals have clashed in recent weeks over the question of sending a surge of U.S. troops into Afghanistan—some 5,000 more to supplement the 8,400...
“Free speech!” has been the rallying cry of Republicans and conservatives for months on end. This really ought to stop. Milo, Gavin McInnes, Ann Coulter: These conservative and libertarian provocateurs have been met with radical opposition from roving gangs of snowflake thugs who set things on fire, break glass, pepper-spray bystanders—all in order to keep...
It was said (by Bernard DeVoto?) of America before World War II that it was as if the United States had been tipped to the left and downward, so that, across the rest of the country, whatever was unattached or unsecured slid southwest into California. Today we might say that the Democratic Party is sliding...
Contrary to what John McCain and others in Washington are saying, North Korea’s nuclear program is not a “Cuban missile crisis in slow motion.” Nor does tough talk from President Trump mean he’s about to launch preemptive strikes against Kim Jong-un. Where would be the profit in that? North Korea is not a cripple like...
It has been seven years since the Democratic members of Congress, ridden herd by their majority leader, Nancy Pelosi, passed the Affordable Care Act, inaccurately nicknamed ObamaCare. During those years, four things happened: President Obama and his party insisted that the law was proving itself a success, Obama Care developed an increasing number of serious...
It is remarkable how little notice the advent in America of the self-driving car has drawn. Who would have imagined that mobile, road-obsessed, and by-auto-possessed Americans whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents made their prized automobiles the center of their recreational lives and prided themselves on their prowess behind the wheel and their supercharged engines would...
There’s an ancient adage—ancient in terms of our Internet Age, at least: If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. Do you think Facebook is free? Take a look at those ads in your Facebook feed, and over on the right-hand side of the page. Ever wonder why so many of them...
In the prison yard, we’re told, men who sexually abuse children are given special attention, and not the favorable kind. In Euless, Texas, at a public school that bears the unlikely name Trinity, sexual abuse is a celebrated part of the program. In late February, every major newspaper carried the story of Mack Beggs, a...
For many decades people—conservatives, especially—have understood the phrase the liberal establishment to mean the social, educational, and economic elite that sits atop the broader community of people who think, act, and vote liberal: the “limousine liberals,” in other words. “The liberal establishment” meant the liberals at the top of the social hierarchy who dominated their...
Throughout the Republican primaries and the 2016 general election, commentators regularly characterized Donald Trump’s campaign as the political equivalent of a reality show. References to Trump’s leading role on NBC’s The Apprentice were a dime a dozen. Some on the left, in fact, criticized the 24-hour news networks for providing Trump with the equivalent of...
President Trump’s executive order restricting travel and refugees from seven Islamic countries evoked utter hysteria from the mainstream media, Democrats, some Republicans, and even some church leaders. That it was handed down so abruptly, providing Week One photo and protest ops for leftist demonstrators shouting “f–k Trump,” “not my president,” and “the ban is racist,”...
Donald Trump exploded upon the political scene as a strongly charged individual, not as the head of a faction of the Republican Party or of a movement of his own. The great question, from the moment he announced his candidacy for the presidency, has been what effect he might have on the party whose candidate...
The pro-life movement has made great strides in recent years, though many people who consider themselves active pro-lifers may not realize it. That’s because the good news has all happened at the state and local levels. State laws combining health-code restrictions on abortuaries with reasonable waiting periods and required ultrasounds have given local pregnancy-care centers,...
Gilbert & Sullivan’s enduring operetta The Mikado is funny because it skewers Victorian British society by allowing us to laugh at the absurdities of the fictive Japanese town of Titipu, where flirting is a capital offense, according to the autocratic rule of the emperor (Mikado). Nanki-Poo loves Yum-Yum, who is pledged to Lord High Executioner...
The only way the American political class will ever accommodate itself to the reality of post-Soviet Russia would be if that country succumbed to the second leftist revolution it has been trying for years to incite. Whether the revolutionaries called themselves communists or “liberal democrats” would make little or no difference so long as the...
On November 8 last year, Donald Trump prevented a resurrection of the Clinton administration 16 years after it left office. That same day, in an election paid scant attention by the national media, the spirit of George W. Bush’s administration was given new life in Wyoming, where Liz Cheney, a daughter of former Vice President...
When people compare politics to sports, they do not mean the comparison to be flattering. Voters, we are told, treat politics as irrationally as sports fans do football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. (The less said about soccer, the better—a good principle for life in general.) In this analogy, the Democratic and Republican parties are the...
In the immediate aftermath of their drubbing on November 8, and following Hillary Clinton’s career-ending injury, the Democrats faced the question every rebuilding team faces: Who is the quarterback of the future? DNC interim chairperson Donna Brazile is not the answer. She’s still undergoing the concussion protocol, after a helmet-to-helmet collision with WikiLeaks in October,...
November was a bad month for the left. First, Hillary Clinton was defeated in the presidential election by Donald Trump. Then, Fidel Castro died at 90 after a long illness that had forced him some years before to surrender the presidency of Cuba to his brother Raúl. So far as Cuban politics goes, Fidel might...
The country is near unanimous in feeling that the elections of 2016 were unique in American history. Some say for the unlikability of the two principal candidates; others, for the rhetorical violence and vitriol on all sides. Still others cite the general volatility of the political year from its beginnings, in its wide swings left...
“Crony capitalism” is the new buzzphrase, now that Donald Trump is cutting deals to keep jobs in the United States. When previous presidents cut deals to allow companies to build new factories in Mexico and overseas while shutting down factories here, no one called it crony capitalism, even though it was; we called those deals...